I was alerted to its presence by a scree’ing mockingbird in the vicinity, but it wasn’t until I looked into the boughs of the camphor laurel across the street that I spotted the predator — a juvenile Cooper’s hawk — clutching in its talons what remained of an unfortunate pigeon:
The heavily photoshopped image gets much bigger with a click, but not any better dangit. The light was low and diffused and behind the bird, and I was about 40 yards away handholding my SLR with its ungainly 70-300 lens. This was pretty much the best of the bunch I snapped until the hawk had enough of my intrusions flew northeasterly away.
Follow